In episode ten of Dark Matter, our lovely team worked with another band of outlaws. It was a bad idea.
Spoilers ...
There’s not a ton to say about the plot this week. Other than that it was actually a nice little heist and was, for a time, a nice break from spending so much time in everyone’s past.
So, the Ferrous Corporation still hates the Raza for the pilot and is going to blow them out of space when the Mikkei Combine — and Doctor Weir (Tori Higginson will always be Dr. Weird to me, even if she’s technically Commander Truffault here) — show up to help. She says that, even though the Raza helped them come out on top last time, people are still kind of against working with this new version of the crew. You know, one that isn’t just a band of mercenaries.
They get offered a job, which Two rejects since they won’t give her details. And, to be fair, she’s right that blind jobs have worked out poorly for them in the past. She’s going to be right again.
On the other hand, One, Three, and Four are right that they should take it. The Mikkei Combine are the only group who would rather employ than kill them at this point. So they outvote Two and force One to tell her. The job involves stealing something from a science station — one that Two recognizes is doing particle research — and working with another group of outlaws.
Their leader is Wexler, who is a safecracker/asshole who gets his ass beat by Two. So he can’t go on the mission. So they substitute him for Five, who has been feeling pretty left out of the team. Six tells her to go and Two initially hid her from the other gang of outlaws.
She proves to be awesome and an indispensable member of the Raza team by being able to get the device they came for and using a shock stick to take out the android guarding it. Too bad for the team that Wexler and his crew are all into the double-cross: sell the device, turn in the crew for their bounties, keep the Raza.
Wexler knocks out the Android with a shock stick, the rest of his crew pulls guns of the Raza team. Then Wexler gets the code to the vault out of One (with an assist in how to spell the code by Three) by threatening to blow Two out of an airlock.
And, completely predictably, Wexler tosses Two out the airlock anyway.
Normally I’d call One an idiot for not calling that, but ... meh. This is more of him just getting the shit end of the stick no matter what he does, which is pretty much his other defining characteristic.
I liked having this small heist be the vehicle for only one real development: Five feeling like she’s really part of the crew. Six is protective of her, but let’s be real: she was an orphan pick-pocket before she was a stowaway. Where else is more perfect for her than the Raza?
The only other real observations are these two: there’s no way that Two doesn’t survive and we find out a ton about her weird past and why she heals so easily. And the Android creating a hologram version of herself to check for defects in her code has got to be set-up for something.
Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.